[retrac]

We may never truly know when writing was invented.

There's a stele that was discovered in 1986 [1] in Veracruz. You could be forgiven if you think that writing is Maya. But it is not. It some other language. A couple other small fragments like it have been found, but the stele is basically an hapax. It is the only example.

And from the one example, we can see that it a system overflowingly glorious in its maturity and complexity. The scribes belonged to a culture that had been writing for a very long time. That is the refinement of millennia.

There are dates carved on La Mojorra 1; if they are in the same Long Count calendar the Maya used, then the stele appears to be talking about something that happened in the 140s and 150s AD.

The obvious relationship between the Mesoamerican writing systems might be somewhat analogous to the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, or Chinese and Japanese writing. One was adapted to write the other. Or they both evolved out of a common ancestral system. How far back might that have been?

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...

[netcan]

Great example.

But... IDK if this (or other clearly advanced writing systems) demonstrate "refinement of millennia."

I think we have a "history is accelerating" bias. Changes in the deep past happened slowly, and the pace of change increases over time. That may be true from a very broad POV... but I don't think it's true on shorter timescales.

There are no hard limitations on going from a newly invented writing system to a professional scribal culture in a single generation. I don't think watershed "revolutions" are something new. Egyptian writing, and Early bronze age egyptian culture more broadly gets very advanced, very quickly. We don't really know what elements have deep histories... but it's hard to explain ancient egypt without allowing for some impressive leaps. Hence aliens.

Also... "common ancestor" can be a lot of things. It could be like the gradual species-like philogenetics of cyrillic, latin, hebrew, arabic and all other alphabets' development from proto-sinaitic and canaanite/punic. The same script gradually evolving in different scriptural islands.

Otoh... "ancestry" can be pure inspiration. The idea of writing, its uses and the certainty that widespread literacy is possible can be the "dna."

The confusing part is that culture does, often, evolve very gradually like species and clades over time. These sometimes leave evidence of the whole process. Sudden explosions can't be deduced from the absence of evidence.

[onlypassingthru]

> The idea of writing, its uses and the certainty that widespread literacy is possible can be the "dna."

It's fascinating that over 400 indigenous tribes lived north of the NA desert border between US/Mexico and there is zero evidence a single one had a written language, while the Maya and Aztecs on the other side of the deserts were writing for centuries.

[netcan]

So... zero evidence doesn't mean zero existence. Often it just means lower density.

Elamite, Sumerian, Akkadian and other languages of that region were written on clay... which lends very well to mass production and extremely well to preservation. They also had large populations and urban centres.

These are all very big multipliers of evidencence. A clay tablet has >1000X more survivability than papyrus, velum or even painted pottery.

Meanwhile... there isn't much writing in central and south America either... even when/where population density and urbanism is high.

Khipu, knitted strings, are the most common known writing system. There's evidence for the existence of other writing systems... but not much of it. Hence, undeciphered one-offs.

You also need to consider that writing has different uses. Most development of literacy examples start with some pretty limited use cases.

Writing isn't like fire, instantly useful to everyone everywhere.

[nephihaha]

I think it is arguable whether quipu is a writing system or not. I remember arguing years ago that it was, when mainstream linguistics argued it was merely mnemonic, because the quipu system reminded me slightly of ogham. Nowadays I think of it as proto-writing.

Depending on what you consider South America, and it is a Chilean territory, Easter Island has a mysterious script which seems to have caused endless arguments. The Easter Island system certainly looks like a script, but where it comes from and whether it was invented there is another question. Easter Island isn't near anywhere.

[onlypassingthru]

All the weapons, pottery, baskets and even clay structures that we've found are missing any sort of writing. Just like ancient peoples of Mesopotamia, somebody could've easily carved something into the clay bricks if they were so inclined but the dna just wasn't there, apparently.

There's a 1991 film (and earlier novel) called Black Robe that fictionalizes what it might've been like when the first Jesuit missionaries introduced this powerful black magic to the natives in the 17th century.[0]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cj_bSkuKVA

[netcan]

Writing did exist in the americas. String writing certainly.

More conventional forms also, to some degrees and in some times and places.

Many of the ancient people's of Mesopotamia leave little or no trace of their languages. Hebrew, an iron age language, leaves only scraps dating to the iron age. One of 2-3 complete sentences from the whole kingdom of Judah is an inscription commemorating the completion of a waterworks project for Jerusalem. They wrote it on papyrus and it does not survive.

Neighboring iron age cultures are known from single artefacts.

The Easter Island script was seemingly written on banana leaf.

There is no deep archeological record of knotted strings.

Speculation from a sense of evidence is trick. Personally, I think writing and proto writing existed and was invented and lost many, many times. Thousands maybe.

Also, while impressive... A scaled up in advanced literary culture is not necessarily necessary, or even useful.

Egypt for example, are those Monumental temples and pyramids, mortuary hieroglyphs and what not necessary? Useful?

It's hard to distinguish between the outputs of the civilization, and its objective needs. There may have been many ways of doing complex, large, dense civilization.

[onlypassingthru]

Recap of earlier point: Civilizations south of the NA desert border (Mojave, Sonoran and Chihuahuan) had writing. 400+ civilizations north of it did not.

[ahazred8ta]

Khipu researchers don't have it easy. It's rough when your only Rosetta stone is a Gordian knot.

[card_zero]

Mythology is involved in inhibiting invention. I mean, after inventing invention, the concept of it, you have a certain motivation, which is lacking in a culture that tells stories about how its greatest inventions were stolen from the gods by fantasy heroes. We still indulge in those stories slightly, by mythologizing inventors. But at least we don't have a cyclical concept of time where everything's predestined by the fates, and we all have proper roles and places, and there's no progress except round and round. That's a tranquil outlook, but tends to be self-fulfilling.

[netcan]

I agree. It's just hard to say anything with certainty (or even clarity) about these "mentality" components. A culture's mythology. It's "concept of concepts." It's so vague and abstract that we can't even name it legibly.

[torben-friis]

>We may never truly know when writing was invented

We won't, by definition there's no written record pre writing.

It sucks how many instances in the historical record are like "welp, they had settlements that point to thousands of people, they made pots and they buried their deceased" that's kinda all we know about places that stood for millenia.

[wongarsu]

In principle there could be images about the invention of writing. The intersection of "those images existed", "they have been preserved", "we find them" and "we interpret them correctly" is however tiny

Even written records of oral history of the invention of writing would work

The bigger issue might be that "the invention of writing" is a rather boring and gradual event. Some administrator starts tracking the state of their grain stores with some symbols, then they start tracking other things and need symbols to differentiate, and over time more and more meaning is encoded in those symbols, until we call it writing

[Baeocystin]

That is a fantastic example of mesoamerican script. I would have naively assumed it was Maya had you not said otherwise otherwise, too. Thanks for posting it.

[riffraff]

I don't get it, why do you deduce this is "the refinement of millennia"?

How can you tell that a script is "refined", especially from a single example?

[4gotunameagain]

For what it's worth, wikipedia says that it is Isthmian script, and has not been conclusively determined whether Isthmian script is a true writing system that represents a spoken language, or is a system of proto-writing

[hattmall]

Mainly from the amount and complexity of symbols. That gives rise to the context which they must include. We can tell from the other more complete examples we have seen that writing systems which are complex enough to reliably convey such a wide range of context generally require being refined over millennia. It's not a 100% given, but it's a very reasonable assertion.

[adrian_b]

Numerous and complex symbols are characteristic for the earliest scripts.

The refined scripts typically use fewer and simpler symbols. The only exceptions to this tendency towards standardization and simplification are in the case of some script variants whose main purpose is to be decorative, not practical, e.g. which are intended for inscriptions on monuments.

[0x1ceb00da]

I don't think it's very refined or complex. It's on the same level as heiroglyphics in that it's pictorial. The letters represent real stuff (face, birds, eyes, animals, etc). Maybe my brain is doing pattern matching but I see a lot of real things in this picture. You need a more advanced language to represent abstract concepts, which is very difficult to do in such a script. For example, the sentence "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors" is pretty much impossible to represent in a script like egyptian heiroglyphics or this one.

[applfanboysbgon]

> the sentence "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors" is pretty much impossible to represent in a script like egyptian heiroglyphics or this one

单子是自函子范畴中的幺半群

It bears remembering that spoken language existed long before written language, and written language developed as a form of encoding spoken language. Purely pictorial communication utilises a small number of large symbols that make it clear what is being conveyed from pictures alone, but the language depicted is too complex and abstracted to be purely pictorial; it uses a great number of small symbols, and you cannot understand what it is trying to convey merely by looking at it as a series of pictures. For a reader to understand what is written there would require understanding the relation of symbols to spoken language.

[jeltz]

> and written language developed as a form of encoding spoken language.

Do we know that it did? As far as I gather early scripts seems to have first been used only (or primarily) for accounting and then that system for accounting was adapted to also be able to express spoken language. But I agree with your main point. This language looks too complex to just be for accounting and likely can express everything the spoken language could and likely was closely connected to the spoken language.

[thaumasiotes]

Somehow it bothers me that mon- has been translated as "alone" in 单子 ("monad") but as "one" in 幺半群 ("monoid").

[eszed]

There's a relationship between the concepts: if you are alone, you are necessarily the only one there.

[thaumasiotes]

The Greek word meant "alone". Thus an oligarch rules in company with a small group of other people, but a monarch rules alone.

Internal to Greek, mon- was the conventional prefix for a meaning of "one", despite the word for "one" being different. This didn't happen in Latin, where the numeric prefix uni- ["one"] derives from unus ["one"] and not from solus ["alone"].

The Chinese terms have preserved a robust distinction between "one", the number, and "alone", the state of being. It's a strange choice, though, to offer different translations for the same concept in two closely related words. That distinction isn't in place in the original words.

[eszed]

I was aware of the Greek - but (sadly) didn't study Latin, so thanks.

I may not have understood your point, though. Do you object to this particular translation (which seems fine to me? Basically, "[thing] is singular [in this set]"), or just that English is a cursed bastard of a language - which, you know, means dragging in the Latin-derived "singular" along with the Greek mon- words might have been the simplest, albeit even more impure, route to clarity. (I'm reminded of AE Houseman's sniffy distaste for the word "homosexual": "half-Latin, half-Greek? That'll never do.")

[internet_points]

The very first letter in your example sentence started as an ox 𓃾 then via 𐤀 α etc. turned into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A#:~:text=1-,History,a – but even in the hieroglyphics it was used to represent the sound (the sound of the start of the word for ox), not literal oxes. The road towards more abstract / less pictorial systems was created for speed and ease of writing, not in order to represent more abstract thought. (Note also how alphabets are changed by the implements used to write them, e.g. runes for knife-on-wood, wedge incisions for clay tablets, square capitals on stone – this too was a pressure from ease of writing, nothing to do with representing more complex ideas.)

[kdheiwns]

This is a line of thinking that's very common amongst people who only speak languages that use alphabets but it's not remotely true. Egypt became one of the greatest empires ever with hieroglyphs and those evolved into a phonetic writing system. Chinese and Japanese of course function and they evolved from pictographs. A pictograph is only limiting if a character that resembles a dog can only carry the meaning of a dog and nothing else. But that's not the case in any language. They all evolved to use the symbol of a dog, or any given character, to carry other meanings.

[nephihaha]

But that symbol can also begin referring to many other things rapidly, especially when combined with other symbols e.g. doglike things such as wolves and dogfish, canine teeth, even doglike characteristics of humans such as aggression and ravenousness.

[nephihaha]

It does look complex. These are not mere pictographs but a refined and codified system of representing ideas.

By the way, Chinese uses a modern example of such a script and succeeds in representing such concepts.

[vkazanov]

I am sorry but this like saying that "chinese cannot represent abstract notions" because "picture" .

In middle egyptian (the language you probably assume) "pictures" are just syllables. They are phonetic, not semantic, in the same way letter of modern language correspond to sounds, not meanings.

Egyptians had no problem expressinyg conplex concepts and they also had cursive writing, which is much easier to write.

[adrian_b]

Nit pick: the Egyptian writing system never had any symbols for syllables.

The phonetic symbols included in the Egyptian writing system represented 1 consonant or 2 consonants or 3 consonants, not syllables. Any syllables or short syllable sequences with the same consonants were written with the same symbol.

This makes the Egyptian writing system an exception, as all other writing systems that have developed completely independently, instead of being inspired by an existing system, have used phonetic symbols for syllables.

This is the very reason why the Egyptian writing system has generated the ancient Semitic alphabet with 29 consonannts, from which all later Semitic consonantic alphabets have been derived, then the Greek alphabet and other European alphabets, and the Indian writing systems and other Asian writing systems derived from them.

Since the beginning, the Egyptian writing system had two variants, depending on the writing instruments: hieroglyphic for inscriptions carved in stone and hieratic for texts written with a reed brush on papyrus. The latter is what you mean by "cursive". "Cursive" is not really appropriate, as hieratic was still a very complex script, difficult to write, even if it was simplified in comparison with hieroglyphic. Millennia later, a more cursive form of hieratic developed into the demotic script.

[wl]

I don't get your quibble about "cursive" not being an appropriate way to describe hieratic. Pretty much every Egyptologist I've heard speak on the matter uses the term "cursive," with Demotic often described as "even more cursive." And I've copied quite a bit of it and it is far faster to write with a nice fountain pen than even "cursive" hieroglyphs. It's not particularly difficult, either. Sure, it's more complex than an abjad or an alphabet, but I don't see what that has to do with anything. The complexity is far more in reading it than writing it. If we're going to talk about difficulty in both reading and writing, Demotic is worse. And let's not even get into Ptolemaic-period hieroglyphs...

[vkazanov]

That is correct, but my knowledge of middle egypytian is limited to a single introductory book, and didnt want to muddy the waters with details.

The point stands still: the writing was not as clean as modern alphabets but was capable of expressing abstract concepts, it is completly orthogonal to concepts expressed in writing.

[0x1ceb00da]

As a language matures, it moves away from concrete things towards abstract things. Eg cave paintings -> pictorial scripts -> modern languages which are very detached from pictorial/phonetic meaning (even modern chinese). These days we have programming languages which do not have any phonetic or pictorial representation. And this trend will keep going on. I think I still stand by my point that this script isn't as refined as a modern language. Just like the great pyramids aren't as refined as burj khalifa.

[jeltz]

No, you are confusing different aspects of writing systems. Pictoral scripts are often very divorced from the pictoral meaning. Moving away for pictoral scripts is mostly a question about ease of writing which is why the hieroglyphs survived for monuments but more efficient scripts were used for every day writing. Hieroglyphs, outside some very early versions, could express everything spoken Egyptian could.

Some proto-writing systems (e.g. Australian message sticks), which could not express all ideas, were just very simple dots and lines. Going from being able to express only certain things to the full spoken language and going from complex symbols to simple ones which are easy to write are two different processes. So while we can suspect that a pictoral system is from an early stage of a writing system we cannot say that it is necessarily primitive in ability to express all ideas. Plus it might be, like hieroglyphs, only used for fancy texts for monuments and similar.

[applfanboysbgon]

> Just like the great pyramids aren't as refined as burj khalifa.

I'd wager the Great Pyramids will still be around in 1000 years and the Burj Khalifa will not, if anyone wants to take bets.

[vkazanov]

I dont think this chnages anything. The writing was less convenient than modern alphabets but still capable of expressing all things necessary.

The closest analogy might be: modern alebraic notation is compact and clean but this doesnt mean algebra didnt exist much, much earlier.

[sampullman]

To make this claim, wouldn't you need to understand the meaning of the script? It's probably not about monads, but you don't know for sure.

[applfanboysbgon]

The mental image of an ancient Mesoamerican civilization writing about monads thousands of years before the rest of us, only for it to go unappreciated because we can't comprehend their script, is a great one.

[jeltz]

Egyptian hierghlyps had phonetic values too so it definitely would be able to express everything spoken Egyptian could.

The main issue with hieroglyphics is that it was a very convoluted system, where symbols meant different things depending on context. A symbol of a bird could be a literal bird, some abstract concept related to that bird or part of the sounds of the word for that bird.

[ted_dunning]

That sounds as difficult as Japanese where a single kanji might be used phonetically based on a Chinese reading (山 = san) or a Japanese reading (山 = yama) or it might be used non-phonetically or it could be some amazingly surprising pun based on any of the above.

Clearly impossible to have a system like that continue. Except for the fact that it does.

[wl]

The polysemic nature of Egyptian hieroglyphic signs is hardly the main issue with learning to read ancient Egyptian. If you're a beginner slogging through elementary translation exercises, the determinatives and phonetic complements help a lot. If you've studied the signs, grammar, and vocabulary you actually need to read texts, you've already gained understanding of the context needed to interpret the function of individual signs.

[adrian_b]

While the proto-writing systems are based on pictograms, both the Sumenrian cuneiforms and the Egyptian hieroglyphic (used for inscriptions on stone) and hieratic (use for writing with a reed brush on papyrus) have made the transition towards having phonetic symbols, used together with ideograms.

Using the phonetic sign subsets of the Egyptian and Sumerian scripts, it was possible to write any sentence that could be spoken in their languages.

This was the most important advance in writing and both in Mesopotamia and in Egypt there is evidence about this transition from an earlier writing system that could write only a subset of the words of a language, so it could not be used to write arbitrary sentences, but only things like lists of objects with their amounts and owners, like needed for accounting, to a writing system that added phonetic symbols for writing any words that did not have their own symbol.

I cannot read the paywalled article, but it seems that now there is evidence that also the Proto-Elamite writing system has also passed around the same time through this transition from having only symbols for certain words to having phonetic symbols too, e.g. for syllables, which can be used to write arbitrary words and sentences.

Before phonetic symbols began to be used, we cannot know the language spoken by the users of a proto-writing system.

While in Egypt there is little doubt that the first users of writing spoke some kind of Old Egyptian, in Mesopotamia there is doubt the users of the first proto-cuneiform writing system spoke Sumerian. However, by the time when phonetic cuneiform signs were introduced, the language of the writers was Sumerian.

In the territory later known as Elam (in the West of present Iran), it is not known what language was spoken by the users of the Proto-Elamite writing system. It could have been an ancestor of the Elamite language spoken a millennium later, or it could have been a completely different language. Elamite is not related to the Indo-European languages that spread much later in that territory, like Old Persian.

[wl]

Egyptian hieroglyphs are mostly phonetic. You can represent any abstract concept in it that you could in the spoken version.